Quotes by Austrian Authors - Page 21

The child is brought up to know its social duties by means of a system of love-rewards and punishments, and in this way it is taught that its security in life depends on its parents (and, subsequently, other people) loving it and being able to believe in its love for them.
Sigmund Freud
Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way into you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. You would wish it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds.[Witnessing the first atomic bomb test explosion.]
Isidor Isaac Rabi
Dark night lay on my eyes, like a veil of black cloves - dust on my feet, at the beginning of the path of knowledge.Tracer from an invisible hand, a rainbow, fell in my thoughts - I encountered the truth; and truth shall be my light until the end of days.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.
Egon Schiele
Each new day begins with a meditation, and ends with a purifying catharsis.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Silence is the highest form of meditation.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
At the same time all the houses round about promptly took part in this silence, and so did the darkness above them, reaching as far as the stars. And the footsteps of invisible passers-by, whose course I had no wish to guess at, the wind that kept on driving against the other side of the street, the gramophone singing behind closed windows in some room - they made themselves heard in this silence, as if they had owned it for ever and ever.
Franz Kafka
The world-wide discrimination against the autodidact has vitiated many people's confidence in determining their own goals and needs. But the same discrimination has also resulted in a multiplicity of growing minorities who are infuriated by this insidious dispossession.
Ivan Illich
I'm fifty-one years old, but I'm not through yet. I have lived a full life, and intend packing in quite a lot more.
Hedy Lamarr
The salvation of man is through love and in love
Viktor E. Frankl
No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it,but longing to degrade not even death;we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends,to feel its hands about us like a friend's.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.
Viktor E. Frankl
The angel said, "I like black-and-white films more than color because they're more artificial. You have to work harder to overcome your disbelief. It's sort of like prayer.
Jonathan Carroll
God is always present. The question is, how present are we?
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
All my joys resemble more a momentary intoxication than the real gold of happiness. It was all but an illusion.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
Somewhere among the commotion I grew rather depressed. The depression stayed with me for over a year; it was like an animal, a well-defined, spatially localizable thing. I would wake up, open my eyes, listen-is it here or isn’t it? No sign of it. Perhaps it’s asleep. Perhaps it will leave me alone today. Carefully, very carefully, I get out of bed. All is quiet. I go to the kitchen, start breakfast. Not a sound. TV-Good Morning America, David what’s-his-name, a guy I can’t stand. I eat and watch the guests. Slowly the food fills my stomach and gives me strength. Now a quick excursion to the bathroom, and out for my morning walk-and here she is, my faithful depression: “Did you think you could leave without me?" I had often warned my students not to identify with their work. I told them, “if you want to achieve something, if you want to write a book, paint a picture, be sure that the center of your existence if somewhere else and that it’s solidly grounded; only then will you be able to keep your cool and laugh at the attacks that are bound to come." I myself had followed this advice in the past, but now I was alone, sick with some unknown affliction; my private life was in a mess, and I was without a defense. I often wished I had never written that fucking book.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones.
Franz Kafka
That day wasn't the first time I had attempted suicide. Simply disappearing into the distant nothingness where there was no pain and no more feelings - back then I thought it an act of empowerment. Otherwise I had very little power to make any decisions about my life, my body, my actions. Taking my own life seemed my last trump card.
Natascha Kampusch
I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.
Hugo Wolf
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
Sigmund Freud
The facts that make the world real-- these depend on the unreal in order to be recognised by it.
Ingeborg Bachmann
The children are in love but do not know with what. They talk in gibberish, muse themselves into an indefinable pallor, and when they are completely at a loss they invent a language that maddens them. My fish. My hook. My fox. My snare. My fire. You my water. You my current. My earth. You my if. And you my but. Either. Or. My everything...my everything...They push one another, go for each other with their fists and scuffle over a counter-word that doesn't exist.
Ingeborg Bachmann
In the sky, far above - Where my words - Written in the Clouds; I've borrowed from the sun, A gentle smile.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.
Sigmund Freud
The real trouble is this: giving expression to thought by the observable medium of words is like the work of the silkworm. In being made into silk, the material achieves its value. But in the light of day it stiffens; it becomes something alien, no longer malleable. True, we can then more easily and freely recall the same thought, but perhaps we can never experience it again in its original freshness.
Erwin Schrödinger
With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.
Sigmund Freud
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home.Speak and attest. More than everthe things we can live with are falling away,and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image.Will beneath crusts which readily crackwhenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders.
Rainer Maria Rilke
My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.
Franz Kafka
To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.
Ernst Fischer
My heart was full and uplifted; it seemed that in my soul the question arose whether such things as Art, literature, science encompassed and completed life or whether there was still something in the distance which encompassed it even more completely and filled it with a far greater happiness.
Adalbert Stifter
Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
Sigmund Freud
At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Elisabeth had not had her future and her parents had not had theirs, there was nothing to this so-called future which was always promised to the young.
Ingeborg Bachmann
Great beauty and youth capture our attention, excite a deep pleasure; however, why shouldn't our souls gaze at a countenance over which the years have passed? Isn't there a story there, one unknown, full of pain or beauty, which pours its reflection into the features, a story we can read with some compassion or at least get a slight hint of its meaning? The young point toward the future; the old tell of a past.
Adalbert Stifter
Wishes are memories coming from our future!
Rainer Maria Rilke
In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.From this one may see that there is no reason to pity the old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that: Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past -the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized -and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.
Viktor E. Frankl
You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
Peter F Drucker
Follow your heart and success will be your unimpressive shadow.
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
If you knew all about it, it wouldn't be the leading edge.
Karl H. Pribram
A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction; he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions but also of entire world views, he is the inventor of entire forms of life.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.
Rainer Maria Rilke
In the religious myths, the creative will appears personified in God, and man already feels himself guilty when he assumes himself to be like God, that is, to ascribe this will to himself. In the heroic myths on the contrary, man appears as himself, creative and guilt for his suffering and fall is ascribed to God, that is, to his own will. Both are only extreme reaction phenomena of man wavering between his Godlikeness and his nothingness, whose will is awakened to the knowledge of its power and whose consciousness is aroused to terror before it.
Otto Rank
There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.
Ernst Haas
Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.
Adolf Loos
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Who do people say the Son of Man is? ...But what about you? Who do you say I am?' (Mt 16:13,15). In the end, people's answer to this question will be the only thing that matters; it alone will determine people's eternal destiny.
Andreas J. Kostenberger
Nobody, said Humboldt, had a destiny. One simply decided to feign one until one came to believe in it oneself. But so many things didn't fit in with it, one had to really force oneself.
Daniel Kehlmann
Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.
Sigmund Freud
Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
One of the reasons why I liked living in Manhattan was that the city would share your mood the moment you walked out the door. If you were in a hurry, everything else was too, even the pigeons. You shared the same speed and sense of urgency to get wherever you were going.When you had time to kill, it was happy to give you things to look at and do that easily took up whole days. I didn't agree with people who said Manhattan was a cold, indifferent town. Sure it was gruff, but it was also playful and sometimes very funny.
Jonathan Carroll
Angels often do now know whether they walk among the dead or living.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
When we do something, we may not think about why we are doing what we are doing, says Oehler, for then it would suddenly be totally impossible for us to do anything.
Thomas Bernhard
There is nothing more dreadful than having to go walking on one’s own on Monday.
Thomas Bernhard
The whole process of life is a process of deterioration in which everything—and this is the most cruel law—continually gets worse.
Thomas Bernhard